


Of the Darkening of Valinor, the Flight of the Noldor, and the Theft of the Silmarilli

by TheLightdancer



Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: AU - Alignment Switch, Beware the Light of the Infinite Stars, Evil Varda is her own warning, Evil Varda needs more love so I'm writing more stories about her, F/M, Light is not Good, Lovecraftian Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:08:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24934267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: The follow up to the first part of this AU, this covers exactly what the title says. It begins in the first year of Varda's 'atonement' as she begins to rebuild her empire in secret and to start to sow dissension among the Elves, and gains wind of a fantastic project of one son of Finwe whose tempestuous nature makes him a nearly ideal proxy to manipulate.
Relationships: Elbereth Gilthoniel | Varda Elentári & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Elbereth Gilthoniel | Varda Elentári/Manwë Súlimo, Elu Thingol | Elwë Singollo/Melian, Finwë/Míriel Þerindë | Míriel Serindë, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Sons of Fëanor, Fëanor | Curufinwë/Nerdanel, Nessa/Tulkas (Tolkien), Vala | Valar/Vala | Valar
Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1804138
Comments: 21
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

_In one of the curiosities of the Elven mind, there is more written about the details of the Darkening than the great wars under the Stars of the Sindar that culminated in the first of the great clashes, the Battle under the Stars and first of the Wars of Beleriand, and of the foundation of their kingdom. To the Elves, it is not the awakening of their fathers nor the discovery of divinity and the establishment of familarity with it in a great paradise that defines them. It is the person of Feanor Curufinwe and his seven sons, of the tempestuous issues created by his father Finwe marring again and having two younger sons, and the irony that of all this family but one would wind up enduring to the Third Age and the last war with the Hell-Queen._

_None save the epochal translations of Professor Tolkien can render the voices of the Quendi to a point that it speaks more truly in their voice. I do not claim that it is going to be as workable, especially in a thing as rife with nuances, misunderstandings, the dreadful Oath, and the legacy of Feanor Jewel-Maker's bid to make the pure light of stars that dragged all the Quendi into an abyss and a doomed war of their own making. From here, forget knowledge and understanding and science, for much will be forgotten never to be relearned. From the time of the Darkening of Valinor to the present there has been no peace in Arda, only an eternity of slaughter and carnage, and the laughter of the thirsting stars.-_ Neil Gaiman, _The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda_

It had been a year since she'd been freed of Mandos's prison, and in that time Varda, self-proclaimed Empress of the Known Universe, had had to become a toady and a servile lackey of Great King Melkor and others lesser than she. They boasted about building a rock and making little trinkets on it. She built the weight of more than they could comprehend, She had taken great pain to limit her starlight to her hair, which drew the Elves to her as moths to the flame, and meant that her words of quiet wisdom that were honeyed venom that was at first entirely fair and truthful drew greater audiences. 

A year, in Valarin terms. A year of Nessa aching for her to make a mistake, that she could lay her low again. She wanted the little stripling, the insult that declared herself her equal and want of the Valier broken and humiliated in a way far more personal than she did with any other. Carnal lusts were nothing to a being that made stars, but they were an effective means of asserting power. When she won her great strife with her Father, and became the God-Empress of the Known Universe, Nessa would be-

She froze, her train of thought passing, her wards on her mind so strong that not even the greatest of the Valar could hope to break through them unless she willed it. In the time of her imprisonment, the Elves had grown and bloated to great numbers, thronging Aman and building great and beautiful skyscrapers that seemed almost grown out of the very material fabric of the world itself, developing powered flight, and means of communication that awed all of the Valar and attracted a more careful attention from her to make sure to target these more than most for destruction and eradication of that knowledge. In that time, the Fathers of the Elves, Ingwe, Finwe, and others, had come to Aman and become wonder-makers.

Only the life of Finwe had been marred by a kind of grief, his wife Miriel seeking to truly die and interning herself in Mandos after giving birth to a dynamic son who was a swaggering force that implanted himself on the world. By Elven standards Feanor was an aberration at all levels. Tallest of the Elves, he was massively and stoutly built, like the trolls she'd hoped that Ilmare would have bred by now. A full foot higher than the rest, his strength awesome, his mind was keenest of them all. Of all of them, he had never sought her counsel, believing her a deep threat in disguise.

It soured her that the minds she needed most to deceive were not, and it chafed at her pride. She made stars, galaxies, neutron stars, the devouring power of singularities and wormholes. And a lousy little thing her Father made sought to defy her. To withstand her power, and her entreaties. That would never be born, not if the Queen of the Known Universe had anything to say about it.

The subject of these thoughts strode past her with two of his sons, the twins. Both were swarthier than their swarthy father, with shifty keen eyes. They were like two stamped out of the same mold, same hair and eye color, and both gave her an identical hostile look. She couldn't tell them apart and it wasn't worth the knowing. The father mattered, the sons were bones to bleach beneath her flames. They passed and she heard from the one with the slightly squasher nose the word 'Silmaril" and her eyes narrowed. Finally. The name of Feanor's secret concept he'd started the research on, a project of such audacity only he could have found a way to do it.

Varda shook her head and strode on, seeing Nessa looking at her down the street, her gaze hostile and her fists clenched. With a cold smile Varda turned and gave Nessa a mocking wave, a kind of provocation that was calculated to make the brutish lout of a woman look either the brute or the buffoon, and unfortunately Nessa understood that and gave her an equally poisonous smile and a wave as she decided it was time to tread on. Her routes always took her here when she had a free day and free time on her hands. Yavanna's greatest work, the element in her trees and her forests that was at its apex here but present in all of them, in ways that negated her power and that of the rawness of her starlight.

The Twin Trees, the Golden greater and the Silver Lesser. For a long time, hands jammed in the pockets of a kind of clothing she'd pioneered and none save, ironically, the Feanorians themselves, had taken up, she stood. She wore what later generations would describe as something between a jerkin with pockets, sleeveless, and a pair of breaches that were dark black in hue and silver boots. Her hair stood free, and alone among women, even counting the House of Feanor, was content to eschew the sartorial trappings of femininity. She was every bit the woman, but she did not need dresses to show it. Her starlight-gleaming hair trailed down well past her shoulders, her gaze sour, and that killing urge Mairon and Olorin among others readily summoned by their own existence rose. These damned things blocked her sight of Valinor, if they were removed, no matter what, nothing would be secret from her. Even in the Doors.

She stared at them so long that if staring could bore holes in their mystically enhanced wood, or if the fires that glowed in her eyes could by itself, it would have. The Trees were stubbornly wholesome and their very being offended her.

An arch voice spoke to her:

**Not one I expected to see admiring the Trees.**

Varda closed her eyes and took a deep breath, hating that this shape needed to do so when her own preferred shapes never did.

She turned to see a figure who to her flaunted her elemental element, parts of her body seemingly stone, others wood, and her clothing the rich and beautiful fabric of Vaire's Maia.

 _ **Well, I am. What of it?**_ She snapped. Yavanna gave her a cold smile.

**Even you, so-called Star-Queen, cannot harm my greatest work. You boast about making all those horrible things that sing of blood and fire, and yet here in Valinor, their chorus is silent, and my light is superior to your own, no matter how much greater.**

**Think on that, and think on why you should be grateful that Great King Melkor listens to dear Manwe.**

As she began to turn away, she turned the head of her Hroa, and spoke very calmly with a smile on her face to Varda. 

**Remember, go near Manwe again and you go to the Doors.**

Varda blinked again, taking a deep breath.

_**Father promised him to me.** _

**Yes, if you had not chosen to rebel. Rebellions reap consequences, Varda. Take them and like them.**

With that Yavanna vanished and Varda remained staring at the trees. Yes.....she would take great pleasure in finding a way to bring them low. Every single slight like this avenged unto the third and fourth mortal generation. Finally sighing with a great histrionic display, she turned to slouch her way to the place she was assigned to work today. At least in Aule's forges there were never dull moments and she was able to find such interesting potential recruits. That Curumo, for example......


	2. Tales Told of Sound and Fury:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Varda spends a day working with Manwe's Maia and his Eagles and then is gift-wrapped an opportunity to offer 'counsel' to one of the Quendi. Ilmare, after centuries of silence, finally meets up again with her Queen face to face.

TWO DAYS LATER:

Varda was never content, nor pleased, to be stuck as the lowly servant in Aman, especially with those beneath her who had taken such great pride in what was essentially the conjuring of cheap tricks. She had become a being every bit equal and rival to her Father, mistress of an expanse that next to its vastness, all Aman seemed a pen suited to mulch to meet the hogs and the uglier beasts of Yavanna's make. Yet the thin, difficult to maintain, pretenses of sincerity and repentance had already reaped one due. Nessa and her suitor would be busy for hours when she was finished with this demeaning task that Manwe's rat bastard of a herald was having her do. The paperwork of the Kingdom of Aman indeed. What business of hers how much oats were given to feed the mounts of Elves and the nature of silt buildup on the eastern ports? She wasn't even doing anything particularly useful like finances or finding out just what her foes wielded at military levels. Of course there was an excess of stupidity and entrusting even a 'repentant' leader of a rebellion with such data was a bridge too far even for dear pure Manwe, her true beloved and destined.

If nothing else it meant that she had time to work relatively unsupervised, and she took the time to look at her left hand and briefly shifted it from the form of a starlight-haired being with deep black skin to show the gleaming singing hunger of her stars in their fullness. The light shone against her eye and her face and her smile was far from kindly. and then she dimmed that light and bent back over the paperwork noting just how many mounts Fingolfin had, as if that would mean anything to her. She snorted. Fingolfin was probably no smarter than any of the horses, for that matter, so of course this was somehow her responsibility to keep track of.

The task done, it did not take long for her to ring the bell and for Eonwe to appear. Her love's little crony was not very little by any standards save that of the Star-Queen, by Ainur standards he was a hefty bulky figure, meaning by mortal standards he would have been a great mountain of a man that only the very drunk, very foolish, or both would have challenged. For a herald he looked like a massive bruiser, and that impression was further solidified by the glare in his otherwise impassive face as he looked over the paperwork and kept one eye on her.

She gave him a distinctly skeptical look and briefly let her eyes burn with starlight and felt a deep inner satisfaction at Eonwe's abrupt flinching, as he turned away from her, her eyes resuming their current normal kind of glow thereafter.

Drumming her fingers in impatience, Eonwe gave her a much more overtly sour look with pursed lips and said: Very well, you have done what you needed to do for today.

Varda gave him an entirely insincere bow, one that he knew was insincere, but that flash of starlight had taken any starch out of his challenging her.

Stepping out, she judged by the rising light of Telperion that it had been most of a day spent on things. But.....she smiled. That meant at least a night, perhaps a day, where she would not be observed by her most reliable watchers, and there was so much that she cou-

One of the Quendi paused by her as she drummed her fingers on her breeches, and then very nervously coughed, which drew her level stare.

"Lady Elbereth," he spoke, surprisingly calm given who she was relative to him and her known lack of patience for such vermin as the creations her Father deemed the rightful inheritors of the creation He built.

"I wish to ask of you two things. Advice, and confirmation of a story."

Her eyes narrowed and she looked around. 

"No trap, Lady Elbereth."

Keeping her gaze on him, he moved around and she followed, the two of them going to one of the various little cafes in Formenos, the two of them taking a seat with some kind of hot drink her Elven compatriot had ordered for both of them. She did not truly drink it but the pretense of normality did its work and it did confirm to the terms of her....sentence.

"Lady Elbereth, I am a retainer of Lord Finarfin. In recent days there have been new storms about relationships between the brothers of the House of Finwe."

Her eyes displayed an entirely sincere interest, widening slightly that she was being asked for advice on this topic.

"You of all the Valar know the merits of humility, can you give me any advice on how my Lord Finarfin may be able to make peace with Lord Feanor?" 

_**What kind of dispute?** _

"It concerns the new brand of jewelry Lord Feanor is making. He......seeks to make a new source of light, and Lord Finarfin accused him of.....I don't wish to insult one so no-"

_**Out with it, creature.** _

He glared at her for a moment and then continued:

"He said it made him like you, trying to make a light that wasn't Eru Illuvatar's. Lord Feanor has proclaimed he can make a pure starlight, one that preserves the original vision of what the stars could have been."

Varda's face was carefully impassive.

_**Then why is it that your lord needs apologize?** _

"He....does not feel it wise for the rifts between the lords of the House of Finwe to grow, not now. Not when the Teleri have been sailing and starting to establish colonies again in Arda, and when there are reports of strange....monsters there."

Varda's face remained impassive and she said nothing.

_**Mm. I would say for him to speak firmly, but politely, to remind him that he is the firstborn son of a woman who knows no equal, so it is of no great consequence for him to accept that his vision might not.....reverberate....with those whom have fear that anything reflecting starlight might cause chaos.** _

The retainer blinked and paused, then gave a single nod.

"That is......I could find something useful there."

Varda's face remained as stone.

"I have heard....stories...from those who have in turn heard stories from the Ainur, of that war with that fortress of yours."

Now her brows furrowed and she stared at him and the glow in her eyes started to seem to shift to reflect elements of starlight. and he swiftly got to the point, not stammering before her (a thing that gave her a small smidgen of respect for the vermin).

"It is said that you held Lord Sulimo as a hostage, bereft of anything like.....clothing, to deter the armies from firing at you."

That wasn't the question she'd expected, or the story.

_**And?** _

"Did that happen?"

_**Well.....Manwe was promised to me, in the time before time, before the Music by the Allfather. Because of my....eccentricities, my kin among the Ainur have deemed me not suitable to be with the one I am bonded to. Unfortunately for me, and for him, he has taken them at their word. I did crucify him with his hands and feet bound to a cross as a symbol when they came to the palace, yes. He was not wearing the raiment a form of the children of Illuvatar would wear, that is also true.** _

She paused, for a moment.

_**All that was was a symbol of how much folly and excess the wars we were fighting created, of what could be lost. The great Wind-Lord, closest to Illuvatar, reduced to a pawn in a game where I should be able to love him as others are loved.** _

A single radiant tear stroked down her cheek and the vermin's eyes softened and inwardly part of her laughed and laughed and laughed to see what kind of fools those deathless be.

From there, a mortal hour lapsed where she told him carefully edited stories of Eldano and of what she had done and sought to do with the stars, trying to quietly implant in him desires to even briefly take a boat out to Ulmo's waters and listen to the music of the spheres. She was not certain that it would work, entirely, but she did see to her satisfaction that her tales of Sulimo in her imprisonment and presenting him as wanting her but beguiled by a cruel code that could easily seek to define the purity of the Quendi had sown some seeds. There was some discontentment in these Noldor, kept dammed and imprisoned in Aman and not allowed to make with their hands. Chafing for tales of Ainur that made them seem......more justifiable to feel against.

Inwardly she grinned with a smile that would have made the retainer, Beruthion, regret ever opening his mouth to her if he had seen it cross her face when he left.

For a moment in time, an entire night and to the next morning given that it was of all the Ainur Nessa herself she was mandated to work with for her next 'session' of her atonement she would be free of anything like supervision.

With that she went to the shores of Aman just near Alaquonde in a flash of motion that led her to blur, and then discarded her fleshly appearance and moved unclad to the north of Arda, the very north, where Angband to her genuine pleasure had become a true fortress even the full might of Valinor would hesitate before.

Standing on its peaks, listening to her wondrous chorus, was her Executioner General, Ilmare.

She wore a form of her own thought clad in a kind of glittering mail that reflected both the blood-hungry light of the stars and her own that gleamed outward from her, her body lovely Starlight with its prominences and the element of a star's body as a mane-like extension of hair from her 'head', her body having darker pools of light that a mortal or a lesser Ainur would drown in for eyes. Her mouth was an open-shut element of darkness with teeth that gleamed with brilliant hues that shifted with her mood. She was akin enough to the children of Illuvatar to stand on two legs in this form with arms shorter than her legs, no weapons visible.

And she was looking right at her unclad, as Varda re-clad herself in the form she favored most. Twice as tall as Ilmare and many times bulkier, a hill that moved or walked, skin gleaming with the hungry singing light of the stars, only her eyes and the elements of her fingers and her toes fully making clear that she had limbs and which and how many, an appearance calculated to sow fear in Ainur and the Children alike. Only her voice, echoing with a contralto's feminine tones made it clear that she was a spirit of her kind in this form, and it was a jarring dissonance with the titanic figure kneeling by her minion, the better to communicate in a simpler fashion.

_**Well done, good and faithful servant. The fortress is in better shape than it has been since the war.** _

She looked around, and then they both became invisible to phase through the roof and stepped within the fortress. It was then that Varda saw for the first time the teeming hordes of her new Eldalie.

Her face broke open into a curiously mortal kind of expression, awe and pleasure and joy interwoven.

**Does it please you, Mistress?**

_**More than, faithful Ilmare. More than. These are Legions. Soldiers, more than the monsters.** _

The throngs of creatures stared at her with an undiminished self-hatred and a hatred of her and she glowered at them with undiminished starlight and they knelt before her and prostrated before her more cravenly than her performance in the Ring of Doom. She laughed loudly and coldly, the laugh echoing through the fortress.

_**Very well done indeed.** _

She turned to Ilmare. _**For the time being, I must remain in that accursed realm. The vermin, the things these soldiers were bred from, have proliferated like the virus they are, in an excess of life. One of them has a measure of the Gift and seeks to pervert my creation to be simply a healing, pleasant kind of light and not the glorious music of the spheres. I chafe at that pretense, but I have a better incentive now. I will show the little vermin that none can make the power of the Stars better than she who kindled them, and I will make these vermin the architect, seemingly, of their misfortune. It will chafe, but it is much more bearable now.** _

She looked around.

_**Retain Eldaband, strengthen it, use the beasts you've made for labor if you have to. I shall return with those False Stars on my crown, and from there, the wars shall begin anew. In time, I shall come, my good and faithful servant.** _

For a moment a hand dark as the nights she'd made that glowed and thrummed and sang with a chorus of blood reached out to caress Ilmare's cheek much more than platonically, or the interaction of lady and lieutenant, and Ilmare could not resist a flinch of nervousness.

With a resounding crack Varda's hand moved and backhanded her across the face.

_**If I seek to slake the desires the Wind-Lord has awakened me on my own servants, you don't get a say in that matter. We shall resume this discussion when I return, and for your sake you had best consider your options.** _

With that she vanished and became a streak of light that returned to Aman, none the wiser to her disappearance, settling in her house well away from the Tanequietl, giving into the appearance of something a true form like the one she simulated would have needed. The next day was blissfully isolated and non-eventful on the outside, the Star-Queen making a point to start socializing with Quendi on a more familiar level, and the Quendi in turn finding elements of her glow to be near-irresistible. Quietly she told tales of the War of the Powers, tales that were very much presented as she would have wished them seen. Not tales of her on her Throne relying on Ilmare to do the actual fighting while she coded messages into her stars to keep her servants active, but tales of her actively present and witnessing carefully edited versions of the passionate affairs of Vana and Orome, tales alleging that Nessa had a taste for mortal flesh that disturbed the other Valar, which was why Tulkas had not taken his pursuit of her further.

Tales that Yavanna sought to have congress with various kinds of the beasts she'd made, which was why so many of them were....generously gifted (and this one scandalized even the most faithful of the Elves but was so deliciously ludicrous that even the most Faithful soon knew this tale, though not its origin, and its effect could not but help to start to dent the prestige of the Ainur).

No truth was there to any of the Tales, but each of them was told by Varda in a way that it would not be readily traced to her, nor to her malice. Indeed, they were told as the kind of dirty stories that the deathless might invent when bored and seeking to while away time in their more drunken revels. Only a few of the tales were told this first day, but through the dawn of the changes in Valinor, all of them would be told.

Nessa and Tulkas returned from a wondrous frolic in the mountains of Arda, where they had been clad in a form akin to that of the Children and Tulkas had challenged Nessa to a race and handily lost it and she had taken her reward of kissing him passionately. She had vowed to wed him, but only when she was sure that there was no further threat from Varda. She had come to Arda to make Varda contained, and the woman's gazes and tones meant that there was no chance in any of Varda's own hells she'd believe that monster on any of her promises. With that, she kissed him once on the cheek (for they were in public in Valinor) and then moved faster than lightning flashes to Varda's door and knocked on the beast's lair.

To her own visible shock, Varda slouched out. She wore that strange blend of trousers, boots, and that sleeveless thing she called a 'jerkin' with nothing underneath it, hands in the things she called pockets. Varda's gaze was hard and contemptuous that day, the gaze of a woman who deemed herself the superior of those who had jailed her and she knew it, they all knew it. To her further shock, Varda greeted her with a surprisingly sincere smile and asked:

_**So what are we to work on this day, O swiftest of dancers?** _

She stammered for a moment, then told her:

_Come._

Varda followed her as she ran over the waters, past the chills of the Helcaraxe (and not spending time humoring her pretense of the flesh of the Children Varda let her starlight burn and the ice melted beneath her as she moved) and they turned to the outer west, from whence she was certain that the generations of growing Eldalie had been harvested. It was a barren place, one that permitted only a vision of the lovely music of the spheres. Stark, a single stream of water and great mountains with jagged edges extending.

Nessa pointed to the rubble of what had been something done, clearly, by Ilmare (the sandstone blasted to glass proved as much). Varda followed her finger and it pointed to the glass.

_I want to take this back to Aman, so Aule can tell me what that is and what kind of force could make natural glass._

_**Why are you asking me?** _

_You have chosen of us all to specialize most directly in destruction. I offer you the chance to be yourself, but in a good cause._

Varda nodded, again in seeming sincerity, and shifted instantly from the form of a dark-skinned Elf woman with hair of starlight to a being of still darker hue and hands that gleamed with starlight. The heat was so powerful that she quite literally carved around the patch of glass as neat as a hot knife through a particular kind of dietary supplement spreading in Aman. Seeing the destructive effect of that fire, Nessa understood why so much of Tulkas's chest and back were still affected by that heat. Indeed, she marveled at his survival, and was grateful for her speed, particularly when Varda breathed on the rock too cool it off, smirking coldly and indeed, nastily, as she handed it to her.

_That....will be all, today._

With that she moved faster than lightning bolts and the beats of wings, and was at Aule's forge, handing him the rock she'd mentioned. For her part Varda transformed into an elemental embodiment of plasma, a kind of prominence, and moved as her own bridge from the outermost west of Arda proper to Formenos, where she met with a new circle of Elves, and told them stories and began to become a trusted confidant and offering advice, at first fair, to smooth over discontentment that in truth she was seeking to ensure not only did she grasp the full implications of all its kind, but to fan it in the ways that would do the most damage.

It was to soothe an argument that started in a discussion of this and an allegation that accounting the only daughter of Finarfin as a Noldo was a case of the 'Forge-Elves' claiming that heritages of Teleri and Vanyar were lesser that she first told the wicked tales of Yavanna that had the communities staring at her stunned, and then bursting in laughter as she smirked and showed them that her rugged sense of humor was meant to help bridge the clearly far from harmonious Elven communities.

That night she feigned sleep anew and then the next morning found herself facing a Vala who wished her to test her commitment to things who was almost never physically in Aman or the Blessed Realm. It was Ulmo, Lord of the Deep, standing before her with the briny odor of the ocean wafting from him and holding a great trident.

**Varda.**

His single word was tectonic and echoed with a depth that would have aced the bones of her shape had it truly been defined thus by the limits of a fleshly shape.

**You are seeking to atone for your crimes?**

She gave him a nod, not entirely successfully hiding her bemusement at Ulmo's appearance.

**Thou hast sown the seed of discord between my vassal and his wife.**

Varda blinked and then nodded, predicting exactly where this was going.

**Thou shalt go with me to the coast, and we shall have a discussion with my vassal and his spouse about loyalty, about repentance, and making others understand what it is that this actually requires.**

Varda could have hugged herself with glee at that prospect, she could not have selected a better kind of topic had she actively sought to find one to further her plans. As it was, she nodded at Ulmo and followed him, her face remaining impassive.

The talk that followed was heartfelt and part of her knew that it had been too much to hope for to keep Uinen, yet the ways her former servant looked at her left her content. It would cost her nothing to leave dissension between the Maia of Ulmo and humanity when they were the Ainur who interacted with them most frequently and were among her most reliable foes.

FEANOR'S FORGE, NEAR ALAQUONDE:

Feanor blinked. He had dreamed of stars last night, the foul things that gleamed in unhallowed fashions more akin to smiles. He had heard what was whispered as 'Varda's chorus' last night, a song aching for blood and skulls and fire and fury. A song suiting the Vala imprisoned in Mandos for an age. But in that smile and the way the song blended with elements of the music.....

He staggered out of bed and went to his calculations, using the ones that were there blurrily, and then he wrote them down in a half trance and sat there for a time, staring into space. Then, finally, belatedly, he stared at the calculations and grinned almost stupidly, a measure of his exhaustion in pursuing his great plans, and then his face assumed both elements of a more familiar suspicious and dour expression. A dream of the stars that happened after the freedom of the imprisoned Vala, when his plan was to purify her work, a vision that offered him all he would have wished?

He would have to find a way to meet that strangely hypnotic and awe-inspiring jail-crow of Mandos, to ask her but a simple question and then.....

He breathed slowly.

"I can make them. I.....I can make them. A light to match the Trees."

Then he looked again at the frozen image of that which had inspired him. His niece, Artanis, clad in garments no less 'manly' than that the jail-crow preferred to wear, and the way the light of the trees caught in her hair and was mirrored.

Had Varda seen him at that moment, both the frozen-image and his expression, and the way his lips moved with his tongue almost circling his lips, she wouldn't have cared about her mask of obedience to the new order in smiling a carnivorous grin there. As it was, one of her newer recruits, a being that was officially a Maia of Vaire, had perched on his door in the form of a titmouse, seen what it had seen, and then quietly met with Varda in her house after arriving as the titmouse and shifting shape.

VARDA'S HOME, NORTHEAST OF FORMENOS:

Varda had clapped her hands in glee.

The vermin had given her not one but several wedges here, and this in the 'paradise' where she had been incarcerated for three Ages.

Wedges unnumbered, each of them now in her grasp to move at leisure. The discovery that the Quendi were drawn to her almost against their will, as though even if her Father knew she, Queen of the Stars, was to turn against him He had still made the most attuned of His spawn to Himself outside the Ainur hollow forces before her, the power of Starlight a draw to them that spoke not merely to the flesh, but to the Fea itself.

And now, with her stories spreading and her insinuating herself in the social circles of Elves, she realized being the lowliest of the realm and yet a Valie offered things that she had not appreciated at first in her aching to rebuild what she had lost too quickly.

To simply find a means to wreck the Trees was as nothing, they were Ainur-make. They could find means to replace them. To wreck the trees, to render the paradise that had tried to exist absent her role in gazing upon it and reminding others of her superiority, and to either destroy the plan to make that artificial starlight or in the unlikely event that it should work, to simply take them.....

Her minion had vanished, and then she reclined on her bed, allowing herself the luxury of patience and glory in pleasure and all that came with it.

More days followed, menial chores with others of her order, being demeaned by having to obey orders of Maiar and to give them the fullness of her light, becoming a talking lamp to certain communities of these vermin that swarmed the shores of her siblings' creation.

No further stories had she told, though she re-told the ones there, and the slow murmur of obscenity and mockery and derision was rippling across the Elves of the Blessed Land.

Nine days later, there was a knock on her door. Varda stood up and went to it, eagerness on her face. So many possibilities of who it could be, and all of them good.

Then she opened it to see Melkor himself clad in his robes of deep purple, arms folded across her chest and giving her a look of harsh skepticism.

_**Follow me. Now.** _

All she could do was jerk her head in response and move in her boots, hands in her pockets, wondering what had brought this upon her, and all of them. She looked at Melkor's body language. Anger was there, deep and abiding anger. Belkoroz she needed to be as kindly with her as possible, for now. So too Nessa and especially Manwenuz. She had time, now, and the luxury of choice, of tactics and decisions.

Then they arrived at Melkor's own throneroom in his own palace. Arien, the treacherous wife of Belkoroz, sat regally on her throne as Melkor ascended the dais to sit on his, and both stared at her with the blunt stares of a king and queen in their throneroom, as she knew she was to be called to account for something.

It was Arien, not Belkoroz,who spoke first:

**_We have heard that stories are spreading among the Firstborn of the Children about the Siege. A Quendi spoke around us when we were unclad and noted he'd heard a version of one of those stories from you. You have sworn to repair wrongs, Varda Elentari. How now that you spread lese majeste in the domain of those who could have you shut through the Doors of Night for much less?_ **


	3. Lies, Truth, and Consequences:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Varda gives promises solemnly made, answers a question, and discovers a lair of a creature in Arda near the Girdle of Melian that hides itself from her starlight and all light together. 
> 
> Ilmare begins to gather together the other great lords of Varda's service, beginning with Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs. 
> 
> Feanor makes a critical breakthrough and has another petty argument with Fingolfin.

THRONEROOM OF GREAT KING MELKOR OF ARDA:

_The story that we heard was an obscenity alleging that Yavanna.......forged....certain Kelvar in certain ways as a commentary upon portions of various shapes taken by her husband when he has taken those shapes. That she forged them and regularly has congress with them and that she has never lain with her husband but once and that he regularly welcomes her lovers to their bed out of that awareness._

Varda kept her face glacially still.

_We cannot believe even the Vala who made the things we saw in that fortress would spread such a tale. It is....tawdry. Disgusting. In a way beyond anything that was seen in that fortress._

Varda's face remained still.

_**Then why believe it when one of the Quendi says it? We all know that I am known as the Rebel of the Fortress of Stars. I am neither liked nor trusted, and the hostility of my brothers and sisters among the Valar to me is well known.** _

She raised a hand as Arien leaned forward, preparing to speak, and continued.

_**I grant that I have done much to earn it, but that is precisely why I would not be the one to tell such tales. I would not promise given the bitterness of the war and of being locked alone in the Halls of Mandos for three ages that I would not laugh at them, but I would never befoul my own nest by telling such a tale.** _

Melkor then leaned forward himself.

**Are there others that you would tell?**

_**Yes, a Quendi did ask me the truth of the tale of the crucifixion of my beloved and promised one, Manwenuz.** _

Melkor rose from his throne and his appearance was as a personification of the elemental force of the tempest.

_**He is not yours, Varda. Thou shalt leave my brother be.** _

Varda bowed.

_**Of course, my king. Such was the verdict of the battlefield and of defeat. I told the Quendi the truth, that I did crucify Manwenuz and exposed his beauty for all to see, and I told him what is that Father told me, in the sense that this is why what was done, was done.** _

Arien raised a hand to silence Melkor's clamor that he intended to raise.

_Any other tales you have told?_

_**Yes, three, all of which are incidents in the war as I remember them, from my side of the War, and only when asked by Quendi who desire to hear my side of that war and approach me to do so.** _

_You do not seek to go amongst them and tell those tales?_ Arien's gaze was hard and her fires were igniting along her raised hand.

_**Absolutely not, for even the innocuous impression of such acts would see me beyond the Doors. I swear this on my own beloved of what could have been, that I would not tell such tales nor lie about doing so.** _

For a change, neither of them objected to her using that world to refer to Manwenuz, and Melkor's wrath briefly subsided and he sat down.

 **Very well, your statement is granted, and the truth is as you believe it to be.** Melkor steepled his hands.

**The Children surprise us in many ways. A preference for bawdy humor when Eru has designed them to be far more sensual than we is the least among it. Bawdy humor at our own expense.....we shall have to root it out, but I can see how, hmm. blaming you as the scapegoat for their own actions would be, hmm, appealing. As we seek to ensure the proper respect is given our order, you shall have time released from your atonement until we deem it time to return. You are allowed to return to Arda, so long as you do not go near the old realms where you raised your Rebellion.**

Varda bowed, solemnly.

_**My gratitude, Great King.** _

With that she strode out, her face carefully solemn, and inwardly was laughing with that same mad peal that had echoed in the last battle where she had faced the lords of Aman equally until Nessa had come forth to face her. This was not quite where or how she'd expected this to go but it would work wonders.

Her own siblings would co-operate in her designs, how kind of them.

Varda went out to transform into a being with wings of lightning-fire and eyes of gleaming suns and took flight, glorying in the sensations, and in the brush of the winds on her face. She felt that caress and imagined it was Manwenuz, and the lusts that had awakened within her burned and she wanted to visit him, but knew that such would not be allowed, especially now. So she winged her way around the skies for a time and then returned in a graceful landing and reverted to her night-black appearance with glowing eyes at the sight of a Quendi before her door.

He was dark-haired, burly, and immensely tall, the paragon in all ways of the appearance of Quendi.

Feanor, Son of Finwe, she nodded to him respectfully, gloating inwardly.

"I had a strange dream nine nights ago, Star-Queen." She paused.

_**What kind of dream?** _

"I heard what we among the Quendi call your chorus.

Slumber dreamer five and twenty years,

waken to the blood flowing neath the spheres,

skulls fire awaken free,

glut thyselves and honor we." He shrugged. "Bad poetry but the stars do not sing well, or in a manner worth remembering." Varda's killing urge surged profoundly but her face remained as impassive as ever.

_**My apologies that my creations cannot meet your standards.** _

Feanor shrugged. "Everyone has different aptitudes. What I grasped there was that the way the light changed....it was the music."

Varda froze, her eyes narrowing, then continued to listen. "Music, we were told, is the way the world was sung into existence. I believe there is a harmonic frequency that is that of Starlight, but not that of.....of your wondrous creations. I believe, if my understanding from that dream is correct that I can sing the stars into existence, bind into them light stronger than that of Yavanna's trees....and thus make the most wondrous gems in creation."

With casual arrogance he pointed to a prominently worked and gold-encrusted ruby on his wrist. It was tantalizingly beautiful, and Varda's gaze was drawn to it, at first in amazement, then keeping her face carefully passive lest the hunger for such beauty to adorn her own flesh shine through, she looked back into Feanor's wondrous gaze.

_**If anyone can do this, son of Finwe, you are the one.** _

He smiled and then said "Thank you. You have confirmed it. I hope you will enjoy that tribute, Elbereth."

He did not look back nor see the way her lips moved and the smile that flashed across her face for a second. If he had he would have turned to his places and burned his notes and come up with a different concept altogether, but since he did not, another strand in the origin of the Silmarils was worked.

That night around Angband, the music of the spheres echoed and sang songs of war and chaos and drumbeats, and in that singing Ilmare heard the message, and in a streak of light flew up to seek the first of her confederates. There were four to find, so that when the Star-Queen came with her crown, there would be all that she would need to wage her great wars.

It did not take her long to find him, for he had heard the same chorus and was ever faithful, more than she. Perhaps in certain ways he was stronger, but in crucial ones, namely the ability to be more than a gigantic ram-horned bear-like thing that had and did not have wings whenever it suited him with surpassing strength that served as a massive battering ram, he utterly lacked anything worth noting. What's more, he was fully aware of that fact.

**Greetings, Ilmare.**

She smiled.

_Gothmog._

The Lord of Balrogs was the most massive of his kind, easily the size of a great boulder, with a heat that melted the ground beneath him.

**She has called. The Balrogs will answer.**

As one they flew on the Night of Flying Fire when the Sindarin, brave foes of the smaller raids of the smaller hordes of Eldar, cowered and even the Girdle remained silent. All of the Balrogs, the original Hundred, gathered in Angband. Their lady would call them and they would come to answer that call.

Unclad, and carefully obedient to her promise to the Great King, Varda returned to Arda, and there gazed over the realms that were forming, finding to her distaste that somehow, in some way, there were two kinds of blank spots. One was a land that should have been a promising thriving kingdom and looked an empty howling wilderness bereft of even Yavanna's Kelvar, and the other was an immense shadow-field. Now that.....

She landed and assumed her full form as the Star-Queen, and something skittered out.

**Light....hurts. Makes me.....hungry.**

Varda smiled.

_**I shall call and offer you food to glut any appetite for light beyond your wildest imagining.** _

**I.....will answer......darklight.**

Varda laughed, coldly and pleasurably.

_**No darkness in me, thing in the shadows. I am the Stars themselves!** _

And for a moment the light of her Stars burned in a brilliance that scoured the ground with heat, produced a chittering wail that became a primordial wailing bellow and Varda's eyebrow raised when that empty area registered....an Ainu, somehow, powerful enough to increase the Veil around whatever empty desolation was there even when she briefly let the lights flare after so long of suppressing them. She dimmed them and as the wailing continued for a time after, a song of the damned and empty hunger near the Girdle, she flew as a winged thing vaguely draconic but monstrous and wrong in proportions, landing back at her home.

DORIATH:

Melian sank onto her throne, sheened in sweat. She did not like how Hroa cooled themselves after a display. She liked still less that instead of the monstrous Hell-Queen of the Black Realm to her north that it was evidently no less than the Star-Queen who had ignited a sudden blast of Starlight outside her realm. She had risked revealing the Veil in so doing, and a part of Thingol and the other Elves, even Luthien, now an infant who displayed precocious power that was of no being like an Elf, elements of Ainu-nature, was Elf enough to have sat up in her crib and stared haunted and hypnotized, that which had made her strengthen the Girdle, strengthen it enough that her power was weakened for a time.

But it had worked. her beloved, Thingol, shook, and shook violently.

"That....thtt-t-th-th-that was her. The S-S-S-S-ST-St-St-Sta-Star Queen."

She nodded.

Yes, beloved.

"I wanted to look at the stars even knowing who and what she was." And then he broke into tears and she consoled him, as behind the veil of the girdle wailing and lamentations echoed within its power and reverberated back against each other, sounding at both dissonance and harmony with the agonized wailing bellows and stacatto barks of whatever lurked in that darkness.


	4. Star-Songs and Blade-Tips:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nessa confronts Varda over the spreading of tales and jokes against the Valar. Great King Melkor passes a ban on speech, and for a year Feanor retreats into his forges, attended by none save a retainer.

THE NEXT DAY:

Varda, blessedly free of the company of her kindred, so-called, had worked that night in careful thought a sequence of harmonics coded into the stars. Pulses and songs, wailing and trumpets, all meant to keep her armies growing and primed, aware that all would kneel before the Star Queen in time to come. She had summoned around herself her usual clothes, her hair strung against her body, as she smirked with a deep and abiding pleasure, content that all was going smoothly. In a swift motion she leaped in a single bound, finding herself near the Holy Mountain and the cluster of squatter-villages of mixed Noldor and Vanyar that lived around them. Noldor dark of hair and swift of thought, Vanyar golden-haired and detached.

Varda was satisfied that even her muted starlight made her drawn the focus, attention, thought of the Quendi, savoring attention much sharper than that of her Eldalie, but no less total in what it was and how it was. Heads turned and the usual small noises of crowds silenced, even the odors seemed to stand still. Not the attention that she had gotten in Eldano but no less pleasurable for what it was. She smelled the ozone-shock of Nessa's presence but was far too slow to register the effect until Nessa slammed her against one of the vermin-warrens that clustered in the city, her arm firmly on her neck.

_I know you're behind those jokes._

_**W-What jokes**_? Varda's efforts to seem ignorant were not near convincing enough for Nessa, who intensified her pressure.

_You know exactly what jokes. The ones about Yavanna making horses, great wolves, and Mumakil to have a lover worth having._

_**Why would I endanger myself by telling a joke, especially that kind?** _

_How better to hide your malice than behind a convincing lie?_

Varda smiled coldly, and then asserted her own strength, taking advantage of Nessa's rage to remove her hands from her neck and slam Nessa in turn against the wall in the other direction, her own arm against her shoulder.

_**The Great King himself has ruled that I have nothing to do with those whims of the masses of this land. Are you, his loyal enforcer, going to rebel against him to target the rebel?** _

Some of the fire in Nessa dimmed slightly at hearing that and she slumped.

_**As I thought. Great King Melkor will not be denied even by those who are his loyal servants on his behalf.** _

Letting Nessa go, Varda drew back. Then abruptly turned and slammed her fist hard into Nessa's stomach, causing the Valier to fall to her knees, clutching her belly, and groaning before her.

 _ **Lay hands on me again, little Valie, when I have done nothing to provoke you except be in your proximity, and I will strike you a blow that will lead your soul to fly apart and to shrivel before the hungry gaze of the starlight that is my gift to all things. The last rat to bite a Quendi and take one down is not the one that should seek credit to itself for so doing.**_

With that Varda turned back to stride through the village, basking in her glory.

_It is said that in the year that Feanor disappeared into his forges, attended only by the loyal bondservant who was smote down by Gothmog at his side at the gates of the great Fortress, was one where the Star-Kindler in spite of being less and less subtle in her power and in her wiles was able to operate openly, becoming a figure around whom lighting gathered. The figure of Thoth-Amon, who commanded power of the Istari, great foe of the Cimmerian, and of Rasputin in more recent times shows that it is easier to be too harsh on the Quendi and the Valar for not being willing to accept the power and the wrath of the Star-Kindler could work slowly as well as grandly. There are no easy answers for why, after the singular clash between them, Nessa the Battle-Dancer did not seek to press within the dissensions._

_The simplest answer may be as the great master said, that to those who pledge loyalty to decrees, once-issued, rebellion is something that can never be. The dissension grew as Varda spoke secret words and whispered and her stars found ways to whisper into the dreams of the Quendi, piercing around and through the veils of the Valar, but only infrequently. Perhaps, too, there is a connection here between this and certain allusions in couplets of the Al-Azif, sometimes taken to refer to other things, to the Elder Things found by the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition, or to the Yithan species that abducted an economics professor, a premier of the Soviet Union, and a chief of the US joint chiefs of staff. Where a mind of sufficient power and malice seeks to find a way, there are no precautious sufficient to bar it, and if that mind is that behind the ever-hungry blood-lusting stars that seek to fatten and to slake their lust upon the very souls of mortals, then there may be no answer to this short of the sorrows that fell upon them._

_Even the Mahanaxanar grasped that the decrees of the Great King, far from settling the turmoil by ordering a ban upon the jokes and a questioning of those known to have first told them, began to stir resentment. Feanor is most infamous for speaking his foolish words, but the House of Finarfin, and among its people, the lady then known as Artanis was no less eager. Harsh words and whispers of a new throne and set of thrones in Middle Earth, mighty realms built of stone and mud made into bricks to ward out the terror of the starlight, lusts for new realms and new places beyond the settlements of the Teleri on the outer fringes, like the Grey Havens of fabled mariner Cirdan Shipwright, and the rival egoes of the sons of Feanor, Finarfin, and Fingolfin escalated matters._

_Brawls broke out, though no weapons would be raised as Feanor sought to harness his music and his songs, and the concept of a purer starlight to work. Great power was drawn into the Blessed Land, the Alfheim of the Norse, in those days, and fell dreams coursed through the populations of the Quendi. Very seldom were there dreams of oceanic backgrounds and voices that spoke in guttural slopping sounds in primordial tongues. Mostly dreams of throngs ringing a desert baked water-free and mountains that looked crystaline and beautiful and gleamed with the hellish hunger and voices of the starlight. Dreams of an endless and hopeless war and many who would die in that war first dreamed of bloody deaths or worse, of not dying and being taken to the throne of Shadow-Queen and Hell-Queen, and Ilmare taking her weapons and going to work, and only kindness in the limited intention of sadism allowed for the mercy of death. Else, much worse ensued, and the small hours of the night echoed in nightmarish screams._

_In all this she who had become least among the servants of the Blessed Land feigned sorrow and contrition and spoke sweet words, honeyed and beautiful as her eyes and the seeming light that glowed within them yet none could remember what words were spoken and often found themselves in the aftermath of brawls. Of all in the Blessed Land, only Varda had spoken in contentment during that time, and seemed to enjoy herself. Tulkas restrained Nessa from seeking to initiate more brawls of her own, a restraint unusual from Astaldo but then of all the Valar he was most suited to war, not merely to the thrill of fighting, and understood that what must begin a war must be begun in conditions of wisdom, not rashness._

_In all this Finwe, whose family was held responsible directly for provoking many of the quarrels and for his favoring and doting on absent children in forges and elsewhere while others of the family spread brawls, and for ill-tempered words sagely claimed by the Elentari to justify the most grim reprisals, found himself slowly grasping that the webs of a complex plot unfolded._

_A year passed and on that day, Feanor strode forward with three objects, the fabulous Silmarilli. In the era since the decline and fall of the Ardan realms and the passage of the Elder Kinds only a few stories have full elements of the Silmarilli. The fabulous gemstone of Shinto legend, one of the three treasures of Yamato, the stories of Loki and of Freyja and the Brinsingr and the treasures of the Aesir, and the Cyclopes that made the weaponry of famed Olympus, these are the closest and they are but distant elements._

_A year of lengthy sorrows, brought to a standstill when the three jewels around which the eldest of the cycles of the primordial time when Gods and Mortals met, were held in the hands of a maker whose body had atrophied slightly in weight and was drenched in sweat._

-From _The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda_ , translation by Neil Gaiman

The endless clamour outside his forges had stilled, a crowd of hostile Quendi falling silent. Among them the only one of the Ainur trusted to walk among them clad and openly, who had been quiet but had whispered words and been away when after her whispers more hostility had erupted unconstrained. Varda had her skin of deep night-hue, eyes gleaming with the light of her stars, and she froze, her eyes drawn to them.

The Silmarils were jewels, in one sense, and this is true. But they were more than mere jewels, they gleamed with the very impossibility that Feanor had deemed within his hands. In them, and in them alone, gleamed the pure light of hallowed stars, the power that was meant to have been Varda's had else been different, and in this light all Valinor was silent and the Valar took on forms clad in mixtures of their own thought and akin to that of the Children. All was silent and it was the Shadow-Queen who was most affected, striding forward and looking at the starlight in rapt wonder, her eyes for a moment fading from the grim and bloody light of her stars to a reflection of a Varda who might have been, the light of the stars that were pure shining in her face.

All Ea held its breath, then, and Varda closed her eyes and wept tears of flame down her cheeks, and then strode through the crowd, and for a time was not seen in Aman or in Arda, and it was speculated, though there is no proof, that she passed from the gates of Arda altogether and strode amongst her creations, the blood-drinking stars that fasten upon that which life spills in Ea and which sing that their thirst never not be slaked. In her absence, for a time, the clamour in Aman died down so much that Nessa's allegations were given a harder look, and then came the incident that more than any other sealed bonds of enmity and hostility, when lies that were claimed to be of Varda unclad spread that Fingolfin and Finarfin desired two of the three Silmarilli, claiming if Feanor usurped their father's love that the least he could do would be to share his works.

A lie that was later shown to be very directly the work of Varda, disguised in the form of an Elf woman elderily and of unknown origin, further added that the Silmarilli were themselves but merely disguises for an unhealthy and unhallowed lust for his niece, Artanis, and all from the envy of her not giving him a lock of her hair. It was this lie more than the others (for Feanor had dismissed without a thought after a year of seeming stillness that out of this silence his brothers had stirred up hatred in the way that had stormed up) that led to Feanor raising a sword of his making, gleaming with runes that enhanced its power to cut and to stab, and placed it squarely on the breast of Finarfin, who in turn glared at him and shouted 'whoremongerous wretch! You desired your own niece and it is this that made that damned starlight! Nothing of the stars can be clean!'

It was at that point that Mairon, herald of Melkor, appeared and separated them and told Feanor to go before the Mahanxanar, and explain how a year of tranquility since the making of the fabulous Star-Jewels had gone to a point where brother placed sword against brother.

Feanor spoke in passionate terms and noted the strange Elf-woman, whose eyes had flashed with a light that was unclean and unhealthy, and at that moment it was revealed the lies and the long harvest of Varda Shadow-Queen and that all that had unfolded beforehand had been her doing (and that it was her absence that had led to the time of peace). Yet as Nessa moved in swiftness with the chain to apprehend her, Varda again was nowhere to be found in Aman, for she had become a streak of plasma that had arced from Aman to the shadowy realm near the area that she could not see and knew only an Ainu of some sort dwelt within.

For a time did Varda bide, and sang messages from the stars into the sleep of the children of Arda, and to her legions. Feanor had been judged for it was he who had sons he should have checked who had fought brawls within Aman, and it was he who had placed a sword with runes of killing intent against the breast of his brother. And it was the testimony of Artanis that Feanor had indeed pleaded for locks of her hair and had transgressed upon her privacy in her bathing a few times to try to convince her, that had cast things still further. When Feanor went into his house arrest in Formenos, he took with him his jewels, the Silmarilli, and other works of art that would soon vanish from Arda, only partially glimpsed, unknown and undreamt of.

Then that night Varda stole into Formenos and knocked on his door, and spoke to him as he stood at the gate with his sons looking on in awe and trembling, as she entreated him that as she had foreseen the Valar had wronged him out of jealousy and placed against him false deeds. Yet her eyes kept being drawn to the chest that contained the Silmarilli, Feanor's wrath became incandescent and at last he perceived what Varda had intended all along by bringing him to exile.

In a loud voice he bellowed:

_Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!_

And he shut the door in the face of her who has dotted all existence with the blood-hungry stars, leaving her on the threshold speechless with rage. In a single moment al the masks and masquerades of being one of the children and containing her Starlight collapsed and in a roiling rage the flames of Varda's starlight coursed through Formenos, setting alight roofs of the city, though the power of Melkor stilled the fires and by the time he, Orome, and Nessa had come in force, Varda was nowhere to be found.

Seven years passed, Feanor in exile and the Noldor become mutinous. Even with the sources of the lies revealed, that their greatest smith was held in exile for making not the unhallowed starlight that had ignited roofs and demonstrated power even amidst the Trees but the only pure starlight in existence gave them seeming truth. That the younger children of Finwe held seeming superiority over the other was likewise there, though at a counterbalancing element, the proof of the unsavory actions of Feanor toward his niece meant that the Vanyar and the Teleri amongst the Elves seemed to adapt the view that a plague on both their houses was the simplest solution.

In that time Varda returned to Angband, called by her and her followers Eldaband, and began to openly demonstrate its power, laying in motion the consolidation of Ilmare's great hosts, using her own power and the captive populations of Orcs and terrible arts that she had devised for the making of stars on a grand scale and applying them to flesh. Legions arose, but those made by the hand of Varda directly were more overtly monstrous than those of Ilmare, for unlike those of the Siege, these were rushed, that the Sindarin be drowned in blood and flesh in time to come.

Seven years passed and the Valar decreed a feast of reunion, though Feanor was not yet relieved from exile, and Finwe remained in Formenos in the house with a roof still shinier than it had been after the fires of Varda had burned in spite of the limits placed by the Trees.

It was then that Varda came to Nan Dungortheb and spoke secret words and amidst a festivity of reconciliation and reluctant words leavened with bitterness, stole into Aman in a festival, hiding behind the shadows of Ungoliant.


	5. First to die in Aman:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the Era of the Trees, the theft of the Silmarilli, and Noldor and Quendi history hits a turning point.

_In the histories of the Red Book, few things have greater impact on the history of the Quendi, the firstborn of the first species, than the ruin of the Two Trees. And yet, in spite of being an epochal event around which their history turns, less is devoted to it than to the descriptions of the realms of Beleriand in their history. The Master did not make much commentary on such a perfunctory element, nor on why the Oath and the conditions of its creation have overshadowed it, but in retrospect one can see another link between the first species and we who came after. When something is sufficiently monumental in horror, we do not tend to dwell on the precise details either-_ _The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda_ , translation by Neil Gaiman

Beneath the covers of Ungoliant's darkness came Varda and Ungoliant to the Blessed Land. Ungoliant was always a bit away from Varda, who was bereft of her form as one of the Children and gleamed with the dreadful light of her stars, her motion creating thrumming droning sounds echoing for blood and skulls and for the end of the unsightly deviation that was life. Ungoliant veiled herself in shadows, fearful of the menace of Varda's glow, until they drew to the trees.

_**Take and drink for it is the light of all Arda, and to you it is given.** _

Varda's words were triumphant, and as the monstrous spider-thing fastened her pincers to the trees and drank of them, Varda carefully remained silent, seeing how much vaster Ungoliant was becoming. She was not afraid, the thing feared her starlight, if it came to some great trial of strength between them it would be no trial at all. In a blurring motion that left the low and continuous droning howl of her stars behind her, she moved to Formenos, where but one of the Quendi remained, Finwe himself. Not certain if he would be here by himself or Feanor with him, and not caring either way, Varda smiled and then knocked once on the door, a knock of such surpassing strength that Finwe came, picking up a sword in a scabbard and holding it by his side.

When he opened the door his eyes blurred, for he saw in the being of utter shadow that terrible and monstrous light that bays and howls for a hunger that can never truly be fully sated known as the stars. Their light held him transfixed and he dropped the scabbard, which Varda responded to with a mocking Oh.....and then tsked, before raising her hand.

_**Your son insulted me in front of all of you. No more pretense. I have never been the least of anything and were he here he would burn in your stead. Since he is not.....** _

Star fire blazed from her fingers but such was her power over the Quendi that Finwe made no sound, only slumping and crumbling into ashes, bits of his jawbone and his skull enduring most directly. Stepping over the ashes with the uttermost contempt, Varda found the chest that held the Silmarils, and with a single bolt of star-flame opened the chest and the gaze held her spellbound even as the drinking of Laurelin cast eerie shadows over Valinor. Closing that chest and taking another, Varda stepped out and then moved from Formenos, even as Valinor's brilliant light faded, and then cast a massive ball of star-flame toward Formenos, which burned behind her, laughing triumphantly and with that warbling note of madness, before standing even as Telperion likewise was drained, and then she unleashed a single arc of plasma toward the cloud-cover that veiled all Aman.

In the era before Sun or Moon, bereft of what light and shields the trees provided, as Telperion died, the Valar and the Quendi on and around Tanequietl noticed the coming darkness, and a note of fearful murmurs came. When the cloud-cover parted even for a short time, screams followed as the terrible hell-light of the stars shone and their music swelled to a great crescendo. Beyond any doubt now, Tulkas and Nessa chased Varda, even as Nienna strode to the Trees and wept before them and Yavanna knelt down beside them likewise. Varda they sought but against the un-light of Ungoliant, swollen and bloated on the trees, even the swiftness and strength of Nessa and Astaldo's great brute force were as nothing.

Swiftly had the Star-Queen come and equally swiftly had she departed.

The stars shone and sang in their hunger, and it was Melkor and Manwe who focused and renewed the cloud cover over Aman, the brothers' power working to reinforce itself and each other, and it did not take long. Even so brief a sight of starlight had induced madness, and it was said that the brave, foolish, heroic house of the Feanorians and the sons of the Houses of Finarfin and Fingolfin had all stared at the stars in defiance. Many would hold that it was star-madness that made Feanor's actions what they were, amplified by grief.

As the cloud-cover reasserted itself, fire was seen to the west, where Formenos burned and the hungry bloodlust of the star-flame fattened and seemed to swell, its song indecipherable to any ears save Varda's own but instead bringing a low thrumming that shook what was around it. Ulmo rose against it with his waters but this was no mere campfire or bonfire, this was the flame of starlight, and before it the might of Ulmo faded into nothingness. Then Melkor himself came clad in a form of his anger and his wrath, and that form was dark and terrible, a mountain wading in the sea with its head against the clouds, clad in ice, and crowned in smoke and fire, Melkor raised his hand and closed it and the hungry star-flame was snuffed out, and he glowered looking at the darkened Valinor, summoning the Valar to the Ring of Doom. 

In seeming silence but the deep intimacy of thought-speech, a means of which only those descended from Elros and Elrond among the later generations and the family of Luthien Tinuviel knew, the Valar began to take the first steps for what must be done. Varda had struck, Valinor had dimmed, and the starlight twinkled and sang its chorus in a crescendo that followed Varda and Ungoliant over the Helcaraxe, the two of them landing at the very uttermost north of Beleriand, but twenty leagues from Varda's great fortress.

Star-madness stalked Aman in that time, and harsh words were exchanged, fists thrown, and fights erupted in violence devastating and without real reason. It is said from this that an old Quendi proverb "Star-madness unforgiven is the blessing of Elbereth" in its first forms came from this day, from the bedlam that followed and mobs of Quendi attacking other mobs. Not yet the Kinslayings, but it stirred the animosity that erupted at Alaquonde, for the Teleri had the better of the Noldor in the fight, and it is said that the proud Noldor could not accept such a thing even when it had happened before and with all within Aman.

Punches thrown as Formenos's fires stilled and the Valar moved to the ring, and the wizened boughs of the trees whistled with Manwe's wind, which pulsed with wrath and groaned in despair to match the twin poles of the mind of Manwe.

Of them all did wrath swell most in Feanor, who stood above the crowd and bellowed for silence and an end to the fighting in a tone that the herald of Melkor himself would have seen as equal, or perhaps superior. He wiped blood from his nose, moving to a piece of high ground where he raised his hands and spoke in a voice great and terrible.

"This is what they have made us." He pointed to the Ring of Doom.

"Vala was she who came here and darkened this place. Vala is she who made the soul-hungry stars that gleam and sing for the desire to feast upon all life. Valar are they who pinned us here and sent among us the Eldagotto, the Tyrant of the Stars. Among us she was sent, we who listened to her words most, for hers must originally have been ours more than most. So little has Eru cared for his creation that amongst people were unleashed a ravening wolf and we sheep were meant to kneel and thank our monster for taking us. I was placed in exile for manipulation of her deeds, but she has come amongst us again and departed and now the world is dark. 

For a moment, aye, a moment, the mere sight of her stars has unleashed upon us and with us a bloodlust that has left bodies wounded and harsh words spoken.

She has gone to Arda itself, and we must follow her."

"Leave the blessed realm?" It was Ingwe himself who spoke and strode, the Vanyar alone among the Elves afflicted only with mad laughter and weeping at the sight of the starlight.

"Where would you have us go?"

"To Arda, to Beleriand. Mighty kingdoms shall we build, and none shall be able to gainsay us. We shall wage war on the Eldagotto, avenge the fate of Aman, the fate of Arda, the fate of all who have suffered since that damned demon came from the stars and brought her images with her!"

Feanor spoke on, his power growing and a kind of force came to his words that would never be equalled before or since. In the Noldor was kindled hunger for Empire, for Domination and for Rule, the very things that brought the Shadow-Queen to the point of ruin and would ever imperil the Elves that faced her and the Hell-Queen. That hunger swelled and grew and in the heart of Artanis the first stirring of Galadriel came as her uncle's words wrought great visions, and she joined her voice to his, the moment that healed, before the death of Feanor, another element of the rifts between the House of Finwe.

So came the dream of Empire to the Elves in the shadowy devastation of Varda's passing, star-dreams that spoke with the hunger for conquest, for subordinating the inferior Sindarin and monsters, for becoming masters of the world.

It was then that Mairon came to the assembly, speaking to the Elves and asking them patience that they wait for the decisions of the Ring of Doom. Feanor turned and gazed at him and answered in wrath in words that have been lost, but such was his power and the seeming visible light that gleamed from his eyes, a light of hunger and music in itself, that Mairon bowed and moved as one answered.


	6. Of the Star-Queen and Ungoliant, and the raising of the Eldorodrim:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Quendi history reaches its turning point, Varda confronts Ungoliant, and finds in the spawn of the Black Ram of the Woods a foe greater than she had imagined. She returns to Eldaband and raises great mountains to render her fortress unassailable, and begins to move her legions to drown the Sindarin in the sheer weight of bodies, and conveniently to dispose of her most monstrous and least useful creations.

_No one in truth knows what Ungoliant is or was or what it is not. It is rumored that old stories of talking spiders that drank blood and perhaps souls reflect the last known spawns of Ungoliant, shadow-weaving things that only partially are held to be spiders at all. There is no consensus in the Red Book to her origin or her fate, and there is a horrid prospect that something vast and bloated and ever-hungry lurks in the darker parts of the world, dreaming until some incautious person comes to its resting place and unleashes it. In all the stories of the Red Book, light, be it the purer light of Melkor and Manwe or the hellish power of the starlight well known to all humanity, is a power that can only be resisted by the Valar or other light. Save in the presence of Ungoliant herself. It is not that what she weaves is darkness, it appears to be worse than that. The only close analogies in folkore are the thing summoned by the Shining Trapezohedron, that form of the soul and messenger of the tenebrous ultimate Gods, the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep._

_It is a darkness stronger than that, for no mere light may penetrate it. The Quendi wrote the history of the Quenta Silmarillion, and they heard the echoes of agonized cries of Varda Eldaigoth, and assumed that the cries were those of her defeat, rescued only by the legions of her own Balrogs. Do the Quendi tell the truth in this tale? Is anything to be recovered? Given the nature of the sources and that only the Red Book endures, there are no answers, only mythologies and questions that shall endure past when the Sun dies and the starlight drinks of the corpse of the Earth-The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda,_ translation by Neil Gaiman 

Varda stood triumphantly, and her gaze turned to the vast and bloated thing that she had unleashed. For the first time she got a clear glimpse of it, and found in it a parallel to the much greater thing she had seen before Creation, the vast and swollen thing that was ram, ewe, goat, spider, a many-tendriled thing that dwarfed all Arda. Reality bent and distorted around it and the creature moved up in a way a true Spider would not, but it both did and did not have other limbs, while having far too many eyes.

**Want more.**

**_More? I am the Queen of this world as I am of the Stars themselves. You have had the power of the Trees, beast. Be content with them and return to your lair, and leave me be._ **

**Blackguard, I demand more!**

The creature leaned down toward her, and Varda shrugged, offering the chest in her right hand, unable to resist a slight shudder at the feeling of the monster's mouth brushing her fingers ever so slightly.

When its too-many eyes that were never quite in the same place, the same hue, or the same condition or size from moment to moment turned to her left hand, Varda's right began to blaze with starlight.

_**You have fed enough. Depart, return to your lair.** _

**NO!** The creature howled and lunged at Varda, whose star-flame blazed out and seared into its face, blinding it on half of that face as it writhed upward and shook and wailed in that endless whining shrieking howl, and then it turned to her and moved to display its backside. As Varda prepared to fire more blasts, the creature shot a web of darkness and her star-flame erupted upward, and more darkness still that sealed her hand with the Silmaril and her legs to a rock. Varda struggled but the unlight to her own surprise and consternation seemed to be able to literally _drink her star-flame as if it were blood._

She moved and struggled, but the webs held her. 

**I feed on it in hand, and on you. Then hatch eggs from body.**

Ungoliant had swollen to a truly stupendous size and her mouth opened as a great pincer stabbed, piercing the side of Varda as she shrieked in a sudden and stupefied sound of horror. In that place in the north it is said the cry of Varda ever echoes as a howling gale that bellows with the voice of the damned. The cry made the inhabitants of the Sindarin kingdoms fall on their faces and hide, and in the Eldaband it echoed, as Ilmare sent the Balrogs to her side. The creature began to drink, and as a small portion of Varda's essence entered it it drew the pincer back and wailed in utter agony, the fires burning in its belly a wound that would never quench.

Varda grinned widedly, her teeth clenched, the grin one of madness, but the wound in her side did not heal swiftly, not near swiftly as the flesh of the Ainur could heal. The one hundred, the great Balrogs of the First Age under the direct oversight of Gothmog, made that attack and their whips and axes and scourges of fire added more pain to Ungoliant than the creature accursed by the small taste of Varda's blood could bear. Others of the Balrogs cut Varda loose as she slumped to her knees for a moment, and then as the clouds briefly parted, she drew power from her stars and groaned, falling on her side as the heat of her body created the Black Mountains at the roof of the world (today part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge).

Ungoliant fled into its domain in the Nan Dungortheb, a nest of monsters and horrors, and foul things that crept out to plague the seven corners of the world. Varda, healed, and giggling with that warbling madness from the pain and a slight bit of delirium from Ungoliant's venom, which would course through her for two more mortal days, returned to Eldaband in triumph. With one of her Maia who had been in the service of Aule building her a crown, she opened the chest and took the Silmarils in her hands. The Silmarils gleamed with pure starlight, a substance that drew Elves to them, but in the hands of the Star-Tyrant, they burned her hands a deep blackness, dealing the first of the wounds she would never recover.

Her wrath burned with heat and she scourged some of her servants, it is said, when it was done, but she, with hands blackened and weakened, placed each of the gems in her crowns and the crown upon her head, and strode toward the Starlight Throne, made of a great stone that was akin to glass but was not glass, where in Eldano she had woven in elements of her starlight. Only a few further times would Varda leave her throne and the first of these came with the awakening of the Fathers and Mothers of Humanity.

Seated on her great throne, she looked to Ilmare, and boomed in a voice of power and monstrous strength:

**_Send the legions forth. Scour the Forest-vermin, cleanse this world of the taint of all life that makes it a blight in existence!_ **

Ilmare sent a pulse of her light and with that the various gates of Eldaband opened and from them poured the first legions of the Eldar, beings clad in heavy mail and wielding great and wicked swords, and they were as numerous as Varda's stars themselves. So began the first of the Wars of Beleriand, the _Dagor Nuin Giliath,_ the Battle Under the Stars, for it was the last battle that the Sindarin, those stern and wondrous warriors, fought without anything to shield them from starlight and star-song other than their own driving will.

And as that battle began, the Eldar thronging against the armies of the Sindarin and the Avari, a new gleam began to shine on the horizon, a light purer than the stars, meant to govern the night.


	7. Of the Flight of the Noldor, the Oath of the Feanorians, and the First Kinslaying:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feanor and his sons awaken the Noldor to empire dreams, swear a great oath, and from it the first of the strands of the sorrows of the Elves are woven:

_Of all things in Ardan history, the Oath of the Feanorians knows few equals. The closest things to them in later lores are the Celtic Geas, save that these are often placed upon those adherent to them by others. The Oath was sworn by the Feanorians for themselves, and in its consequences came the very worst chapters of Elven history, where as terrible and squalid as the war with the Great Enemy in the Star_ - _Fortress was concerned, here were the worse sorrows where the very worst enemies of the Quendi became no greater external force than the very Quendi themselves. We who are human know how the dream of empire infects and poisons those who wield it. How much moreso for Elves, and still worse when the dreams came from the star-hunger of the very foe they built their empires to face?-The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda,_ translation by Neil Gaiman.

The clamor had risen to a great level when the Valar at last broke the Ring of Doom, and it was no less than Melkor and Arien themselves who came to Feanor, the crowds parting, and it was both of them that knelt.

Your Silmarils offer us the chance to restore the Trees, to undo the harm that has been done all Arda. In the pure light of the stars, they may even have a chance to cleanse the ravages of Varda, and to undo some of her marring.

"Take my Silmarils? Then you may as well kill me and I shall be the first to die in Aman!"

Not the first, spoke Mandos, who had followed them, though none understood his meaning. Nessa had gone to Formenos to see what precisely had burned there, then froze when she approached the House of Finwe, seeing the horribly burned body there.

She returned and spoke in thought-speech to Melkor, who froze for a moment.

She has taken your Silmarils, Feanor Curufinwe, and your father is dead.

Feanor shouted in anger and wrath and defiance and grief intermingled all in one, and then turned to the Great King and the Great Queen.

"You and your kind have done this, all of this. She who has darkened Valimar is one of your kind. She of the Stars, the things of madness that sing and thirst for the blood of all life. Where she walks she sows madness and ruin her train and you, my lord, you let her loose. Let the monster out to play, and in her eyes all that is ours and yours has burned. She too thirsted for my Silmarils, she slew my father and stole them and now, Great King, you insist that I should let another steal them as she has done?"

Gasps arose even from his supporters, and staring levelly at Melkor, he shouted:

"I name the thing on that throne to the south of the Blessed Land Elda-gotto, Star-Tyrant, and I ask you, my sons, to raise your swords." Seven swords joined his, and in that anger, wrath, grief, and the star-madness that gleamed in his eyes and in their own and so many of those who led the Quendi in those distant days shaped what was sworn.

"We, the House of Feanor, swear unto the point of death by Taniquietl and by the Allfather himself, that none, neither Elf nor any other of the Children of Illuvatar who may exist, nor Maia, nor Vala, nor the Allfather may take a Silmaril from our family. To the death we shall pursue any that seek to do so, so ever shall it be!"

Melkor remained calm in the face of this oath, and he simply nodded, as if answered.

As you said it, Son of Finwe, so then shall it be.

With that he turned his back upon him and in the eyes of the leaders of the Noldor that blazed with star-madness there was unity of purpose. They too turned, as the Teleri came to Alaquonde, rallying around their ships, donning armor and weaponry out of what they hoped was something wrongfully feared.

Within an hour's time as Valinor defined it, the legions of the Noldor arrived at the havens of Alaquonde where the greatest ships of Elf-Make rested, enough to transport all of the legions and their families that sought to go to Arda, to wage the terrible and splendid War of the Jewels. Olwe himself came to face the sons of Feanor and Feanor himself. It was Olwe who had struck Feanor the blow that had cracked his nose and made it bleed, and it was Olwe clad in armor that blended refinement and weaponry with terrible killing edges who stood before the ship.

"From brawls to insulting the powers, now to thievery. Is there no low to which you will not drag us, son of Finwe? Go back to your homes, let the madness fade. You looked on the stars and it is their power that burns in you, and through you. It has made us foes, out of the power that is within that song that speaks to us in ways we have not yet learned to resist. Go back, O Noldor, for you have sworn rashly. Oaths, once sworn, must be pursued to the bitter end. If you leave in Star-madness you shall drag not just your clans but all the Quendi into a hell of our own making, a hell that shall burn us as fiercely from within as the thing from the stars seeks to do by the fires that course within her and within the fearsome clear nights."

Feanor looked at Olwe, whose words were passionate, and whose weapons were held away from a threat, and simply laughed, coldly.

"Coward! You too have suffered from them, and from those monsters. I hear that her thralls among the Quendi have assaulted your own colonies. It is not fear of damnation that motivates you, you wish to keep your ships and to build colonies for yourself! Greed, not justice. Get out of our way and we may not burn these ships and your little colonies can bring them back. We will take them by peace or over your thrashing corpses, it matters not."

Olwe sighed. "So be it," and with that the archers of the Teleri opened fire in warning shots that sparked from the armor of the Noldor, and Feanor grinned. 

His soldiers in turn opened fire with the first of a kind of weapon that would define elements of the First Age, weaponry that would be adapted and wielded, too, by the legions of Eldaband and empowered by the starlight of Varda. Gunpowder had been known to the Elves for many and many a long long aeon, and so too the simple mechanics of firearms. It was Feanor and his sons who first decided to make them from blueprints into actual weapons, concepts that had advanced far from the primitive arquebuses of the initial designs. To the children of the 20th Century it would have been bolt-action rifles that were unleashed, and in the fire and fury of the gunshots the Kinslaying began. Five volleys fired and then the Noldor in their heavy armor with their bayonets moved, as a group of Teleri pikemen moved, too.

After this First Kinslaying, which was among the quickest, even in Aman the dreadful weapons of the Noldor became and remained the basic armament of Elves, for none could deny the grim effectiveness. By scores and hundreds fell the soldiers of the Teleri and the bayonets fell upon them and a brief gap in the cloud cover let in the hellish chorus of stars that seemed to sing in unity with the screams and gasps of agony. For the Noldor it was a blurry mixture of scenes, gunfire, rows of falling Elves, blood spurting, individual elves slain but no clear picture. For the Teleri it was an old taboo broken in fire and fury, their soldiers broken and powerless to stop the Noldor, it was thievery, and it was also a case where Galadriel stood paralyzed between her peoples, but eventually took the side of the Teleri, taking her rifle and saving the wife of Olwe and Olwe himself from being bayoneted to death by two Noldor lords, and yet in turn the dreams of empire would not let go of her and she went with them.

With bloody corpses and broken bodies behind them the Noldor took the ships and the fleets into the hellish ordeal of the Grinding ice, subject of many lays that were lost in the way of the War of the Jewels and the losses of the great cultures of the First Age. Of the Noldor that went a seventh were lost to the Ice, a harvest of blood to match that exacted from the Teleri but not one in the frenzied scenes of massacre but simply the fearsome power of ice and snow. When they had sailed, they had seen a towering and dark figure, and it was said by those closest who could see best that it was no Maia but Mandos himself:

_Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be for ever._   
_Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken._

With pillars of smoke and the smell of blood after them, the Doom of the Noldor ringing in their ears, the chorus of the stars above that thirsted for blood and drank their due, the Noldor crossed the Helcaraxe, braving the starlight and its song, the power of Aman for all that they had defiled it surging in them and glowing in a powerful sense that echoed outward, and by degrees they crossed, even when one of the sons of Feanor, Amras, froze to death in a ship that broke upon the ice, exacting the first of the House not to the tolls of the battlefield but to slake the blood-hunger of the Stars. 

Beleriand flamed with the Battle Under the Stars, the hardy Sindarin standing the heavily mail-clad hordes of the Eldar in finest heroism, even as the Valar's great symbols were raised and the shards of the Trees preserved by Yavanna and Vana and Nienna and Este. The hordes of Varda and the Star-Tyrant herself were drawn, even as the Eldorodrim were raised and gleamed in brilliant shining transparent crystal that was akin to glass but hard and resilient to any natural force that would seek to smite it until the War of Wrath came, to the north.

Starlight shone and sang in glee at the shedding of blood, yet the coming of the Noldor was marked by pillars of fire from the burned ships, by the blowing of great silver trumpets....and the light of the moon that caught the light of Aman and and marked the Noldor under Feanor, together with the first of the Naugrim from mighty Belegost and Nogrod, as the third element of an encirclement that smashed the armies of Varda and the shambling monsters made in haste melting like snow where Varda's star-flame burned.


	8. The Coming of the Noldor and the First War of Beleriand:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The armies of the Noldor, Nogrod, Belegost, and the Sindarin destroy the first armies of Angband in the First War of Beleriand as the Moon rises.

_In one of the few cases in the Red Book where there are traces of non-Noldorin voices, there is a surprising controversy over what was or was not 'the War under the Hungers of the Stars' as it is more directly translated. As ever, the masterful translation of Professor Tolkien preferred phrasing that worked more fluidly in English than that which is strictly true to the phrasing of the older languages. In the eyes of the Noldor, their arrival on the shores of Beleriand with the Moon behind them and the trumpets of the armies of Feanor and of all his brothers save Finarfin marked the battle and the war. In the eyes of the Sindarin they had waged war for centuries against ever larger hosts of Eldar empowered and maddened by the Eldaigoth's starlight, and the Noldor claimed credit for a war that they had fought and waged beforehand. The first great stirring from Angband, as the Elves called it, and Eldaband, as Elentari and her legions called it, was to them the true Dagor Nuin Guiliath, and was fought when only small colonies of Teleri from Aman brought any news from Valinor and the Blessed Realm at all._

_A few of the Sinarin lays preserved but not used by the master in his great translation make this view very direct, and they are included in the appendix to this translation-The Red Book of Westmarch and the Wars of Arda,_ translation by Neil Gaiman. 

THE REALM OF AMAN:

After the Flight of the Noldor and the dawn of the Kinslaying, the Valar agreed that Mandos, Manwe, and Melkor would issue whatever judgment of Eru would be upon the Noldor for their folly. Aule, Yavanna, Nienna, and Vana went to the Trees while Nessa returned, frustrated, from the failure to find Varda before she'd made herself at home in the renewed and revived version of her fortress. Aule stood in a form of his own thought, a deep black to match Varda's own, the heat of his anger and the imagery and symbolism of his forges blazing like veins of molten red, his eyes likewise gleaming. His fingers were on his chin as Nienna wept near the trees and Yavanna sought to save what she could. With them knelt Vana, whose power sought to work with her sister's and to augment them, and the gleaming magic of the Ever-Young blended with the Tree-Queen.

Aule, who had pondered and sought through vast reams of what were and were not equations, after a fashion, stirred himself to move and raised his hands and began a low incanation in tune with the rhythms of his wife and her sister, and by their combined power and strength, each laboring in their own fashion, each tree brought forth one seed. The seeds were taken by Yavanna and Nessa, and from them rose lesser trees, as the Valar in turn decided to send Varda two symbols, exchanging furious-paced exchanges of thoughtspeech.

Two lights, one to govern the night, one to govern the day. One was the spirit Tilion, who was given raw stuff of light akin to that in the Silmarils but of far lesser quality, made from the power of Melkor the Great-King himself. With this he forged a great sphere that was his and would become his, and he became both the Moon and its guiding spirit, at times sinking within his sphere, at other times actively presiding over it as a being of will and person. At first there was no shadow on the Moon, and it was this pure Moon that rose, with the work of the Valar, when the Noldor landed on the shores of Beleriand and in its brilliant glow there was that amplification of the horns that rang in their ancient music, and of the light of Aman.

For the day, it was decided on what was a very great gamble, one that would assure whoever did it the most personal enmity of Varda Elentari, and with this, two further discussions were held. One, audibly, with the Vanyar and the Noldor, now under the leadership of a returned, pale, and repentant Finarfin, as well as the surviving Teleri, on the hiding of Valinor. This one was brief and all welcomed both the hiding and being able to hide as much as possible from the ever-hungry soul-thirsting hell-light of Varda Star-Queen's dreadful creations.

The other was longer, and it came about, in the end that it was Arien, Queen of the Valar, who took on herself the role to cast defiance to the Star-Queen in her own sphere. Ever had Arien despised Varda since before the dawn of time, and in this, Arien saw a chance to make the Star-Queen know that which would ever endure as a sign and a symbol toward her. Arien of the Valar was the closest thing to a Valier of flame and of fire, and it was her to whom all that became the Valaraukar owed loyalty. The loss of the most powerful of her Maiar to the dreadful Queen of the Starlight was its own element in their grievances, and so she willed herself to become the singular Valier to whom there has never been question of her existence. 

Those times when the Sun has seemed to react in a more personal fashion than the strict laws of empirical science indicate, or even to become a woman shining and terrible with a great sword as has become known have explanations, and it is not the credulous minds of prior generations. In all the infinite heavens, there is but one star that is not a force of soul-drinking horror, animated by the malevolent will and spirit and power of she who is beyond the Doors of Night ever hungering to return to this world to burn it to its ashes, the Sun, known by her most ancient name in all primordial human tongues as 'Arien', for whom it is believed that an ancient name of the Indo-Aryan peoples is a very derived form of her name.

It took seven days for Arien to prepare herself to part from her husband and her king, who accepted in turn the symbolism of a day-star with relish, and for Arien to prepare herself for the results of all that would follow. Melkor promised her that as he anchored the world on his great throne on Taniquietl that they would hold the star-hunger at bay, and that life would endure.

BELERIAND, SEVEN DAYS EARLIER:

The Sindarin armies that had held the hordes of Angband back, the swollen creatures that roared with eyes that gleamed with the soul-rending hunger of the stars, had mobilized on a grand scale first at the start of this battle. At each stage of the Enemy's growth in what was sent against them, so had they matched it. Yet so vast and teeming were the swarms of the armies of Angband that the Sindarin had found themselves pressed in ways they had never imagined possible. Their will and strength honed to resist the star-song and the soul-hunger was more than equal to the frenzied blind thrashing of the Star-Horde, and had the numbers been smaller the fight would have ended as others had before it, with song and feast and joy beneath the soothing shadows and darkness of the trees.

Even the legions of Doriath and Melian's kingdom had come forth, Elu Thingol's armies holding the center.

Help unexpected, not looked for, but awesomely effective came with the low bass rumbles of war-horns and a massive army in precise discipline led by two figures with more superlative armor and fantastic helms. Khazad of the Firebeams and Broadbeards, the former marked by the reddish paint of the bearded war-helm, the latter by a blocky triangular shape stylized with Dwarven writing. Mithril-armored, wielding their own stubbier equivalents of Noldor firearms, the Dwarves launched volleys of heavier weaponry their strength could support, and their striking straight into the eastern flank as a clenched armored fist sowed disarray and marked the first friendship of Elves and Dwarves in blood on the battlefields of the War under the Stars.

First then was it heard: Baruk Khazad! Khazad-ai-menu! and before them fell the Eldar and as the armies of the Elves and Dwarves met, so rose the Moon and were heard the trumpets of the Noldor, and from the left flank the Noldor struck with the light of Aman magnified by the shining white light of the Moon, and well-met by moonlight were the proud armies of the Free Peoples, and before them and the thunder of their weaponry and valor of their steel the deformed armies of the Eldar were as wheat before the flames, but Feanor and his sons pursued the foe to the very gates of Angband, that vast and crystalline realm that reflected the starlight.

Feanor hammered on the gates, and it was said among the Quendi that Varda Elentari trembled on her throne.

In truth, Varda simply laughed that echoing pealing sound of madness and with a wave of her hands her Balrogs moved to the gates and hurled the door open, throwing down Feanor, and where others of his sons fled the presence of the five Balrogs that had risen, Feanor fought for hours against the full weight of Gothmog and his high command, scoring wounds on each of them, his son Maedhros at his side and able to strike with a pike taken from the body of one of the Sindar clean into the flaming eye-socket of one of the Balrogs before the haft of the axe of another hurled him on his face and he knew no more for a time.

Feanor stood over the body of his son and fought valiantly, but one Quendi, even the greatest among them, even possessed by the sudden awareness when the Star-magic fell of what he had done, what he had done to his sons, and to his people and given the courage and staying power of despair and seeing to die a death worth songs, was no match for that force. He was hewn in three by Gothmog personally, and as he fell his Fea erupted in the burning power that reflected his glory, a blast of light that scattered the Balrogs with it, and Maedhros was taken into the depths of Angband, where he stood before the throne of the Star-Queen.

THRONEROOM OF THE ELENTARI:

Maedhros knew, when he awoke with his head throbbing, and the hands gripping him felt imbalanced but monstrously strong and burning as with a strange heat, that he and his father had paid the price for recklessness. He knew further from the gleaming light and the horror of that gleam and the sickly songs that whispered and pulled at his consciousness, seemingly at his very soul, that he had not awoken in the best of all worlds. And indeed, it was then that he saw her for the first time since his father had shut the door on her face before them all in Formenos-that-was.

She was in the form of a great queen, her body her infinite stars in a field of blackness, close enough in a loose sense to that of Elves or the Naugrim, but longer in proportions. Where that horrid singing light that echoed:

_She tears out the eyes,_

_she makes them die,_

_Skulls for skulls,_

_life for life,_

_blood for blood,_

_strife for strife_

All of this into infinity, wearing a great crown on her head with four points. The Silmarils of his father's make blazed with a brilliant purity against the befouled soul-hungering light of her flesh, and that light was a force that called to him, called to a thing innate in the Quendi that wished to welcome the stars, her presence like an assault at multiple levels against his senses. That face of hers that was only like a face in outline moved and the starlight provided a shape that was hauntingly beautiful, lips that were streaks of stars and the lips parted and spoke: 

_**As your father perished, so perish all who stand against me. You shall be my warning that those beggars who come to my doors shall treat me with the respect owed she who has made the stars and to whose glory and in whose vision they sing.** _

_**An army of dross sent to die has perished, and your father is smote into ruin and you have seen the Empress of the Known Universe in the flesh and lived to tell the tale. Now, beggar, you shall hang by your wrist from one of my towers, until such time as I deem fit either to burn you to ashes, as was done to your grandfather, or to have you hewn in pieces, as was done to your father, or perhaps simply to waste away crucified with your flesh exposed in full, as was done to my beloved Wind-Lord, who in time to come shall be mine and we shall know the pleasures of the flesh together.** _

_**I will give you this. You did fight valiantly, all the way to my gates.** _

She moved her hand derisively, a brief warbling titter that passed for laughter slipping from her lips.

_**And this is what it gets you, the curse of the deathless that you are born to hang.** _

With that he turned and there he faced the shining flesh and somehow the visible mouth of Ilmare, known in later years as Hell-Queen, and the ruler of the Island of the Gaping Abyss, and still later as the Queen of the World-Destroyers, and in that light he knew darkness, awakening hanging from his wrist upon the crystalline towers.

The stars sang in their courses and Varda heard in their choruses the warning that soon would come the awakening of the Second-Born. The day of their awakening, something else would awaken, too. So she spoke in turn to her stars to search for them, and across the time of days, as the new and awkward alliance began to form and the lords of Doriath welcomed the daughter of the House of Finarfin alone among that family as kin, she who in later years would be called Galadriel, the stars searched and the stars hungered. And there, in Edenic Hildorien, the stars found the ancestors of humanity.

For the only time in her rule of Angband and the Wars of Beleriand, Varda removed the heavy crown, and move unclad from her throne, the last time that such would be her privilege. Beneath the light of the moon she arrived at Hildorien, waiting, seeing the slumbering shapes of the fathers and mothers of all humanity, all dark of skin, dark and rich in hue, very much more the children of Aule than those who would have been hers otherwise and were now her great foes. A wicked design came to her then and she waited, patiently, taking a form dark as night where two galaxies became her eyes and she gave herself the appearance of robes illuminated by a starlight-fringe.


End file.
